


Ruling Gods

by DrusillaStanden



Category: Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn BBC
Genre: Dark Romance, F/F, Gothic, Lethal Ladies, Murder (basically canon compliant...they die in the book just differently!), Natural Born Killers Vibes, Non-Canon Queer Characters, Non-Canon Relationship, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 07:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16445075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrusillaStanden/pseuds/DrusillaStanden
Summary: This is composed of a number of short episodes featuring the characters of Mary and Hannah as they are found in the  BBC adaptation of Jamaica Inn. Some details are added from the book. The incidents are somewhat fragmentary but form a coherent narrative alongside the adaptation.





	Ruling Gods

**Author's Note:**

> This picks up the narrative when Mary is picked up by Hannah and Davy after the fair and she has been deserted by Jem. Some of the interactions between Mary and Hannah are definitely uncomfortable but the story is largely about freedom and self-determination.

She was soaked to the skin. Drenched in shame. She knew better. Her thoughts darted to her Aunt Patience and she wondered if she and uncle Joss had ever gone to the fair. Perhaps they’d met there. And he’d bought her, or won her, some fairing. And he’d smiled… That smile was broken now but she could see what it would have been. She was no different after all.  
Davey sat opposite her. She could barely lift her eyes to his. Her arms crossed before her, pinning the saturated shawl to her body. And Hannah spoke of something but she could think of nothing but her Aunt Patience at the fair and how his eyes would see right through her.  
“I suppose you’re disappointed in me,” she challenged, ashamed. But she did not hear his answer. She saw her aunt Patience’s face as her uncle whirled her away into the dance… Hannah was asking something of her: to take off her clothes. Because they were wet. Hannah held the blanket up to shield her from Mr Davey, her own cool eyes passed over Mary in a show of indifference. Her hand stroked Mary’s arm, once and again, and her body leaned closer. For warmth. And Mary wanted the hand to stop, to cease. She wanted to slap it away. To hold it, trap it in place...  
She shrugged off her shirt. Davey had mentioned strength but…  
“I have shown the weakness of a woman”, she berated herself. And she stopped listening. Her mouth giving answers she cared nothing about. She felt nothing but foolish and the warmth of Hannah beside her. Those hands that had cupped her face earlier, that she had wanted to shy away from, that touched and wanted too much… Would she have felt different if she’d said yes, if he’d stayed, if she hadn’t found herself alone on a road at night with these two judges, one whose eyes stared right through her and one whose hands…  
No. She wouldn’t have wanted to have stayed. To become her aunt Patience at the fair. That laughing, youthful face faded from her mind’s eye and was replaced by the older one she knew and wasn’t just the creation of an old memory but a reality, fresh and clear and striking. No, she wouldn’t want to have stayed for any man.  
“She isn’t different,” Hannah’s rough voice was quietly correcting Davey.  
“But I am,” thought Mary. I will be. And as Davey talked of how she would grow and forget and become something different. She gripped the hand which had fallen into her own, whose thumb stroked the inside of her wrist, coolly, soothingly, possessively, and thought, ‘I know.’

\----------------------------------------------------------

It seemed like an eternity had passed since the fair…and what had gone after. Her mind fled the memories as her ears filled with the swell of the sea and her own screams. “There must be some good in you,” she had cried. But she was wrong. There was no good in them. There was nothing. Nothing left at all. Jem might be different now but time would have taken the fair from them and all that light excitement. That laughing risk would have become a drudgery, fading into her aunt’s image or her mother’s as he became what he could not but become. Nothing. Nothing at all would be left.  
It was too late. She knew it was too late for her aunt but if she didn’t pretend that it wasn’t, then it was too late for her already as well. They had turned the key on her but Jem had shown the way. He had broken through the window and vowed vengeance and left, left to whatever path and whatever deed he thought fit. But she would follow through the shattered pane and go her own way.  
She took the road to Alternum. Bruised, but determined, she strode the path, her mind focused on the only source of aid of which she could be certain. But when she arrived at the parsonage, he was not there. Hannah opened the door. She would have turned away when Hannah told her that he wasn’t there but she found her hand taken and she couldn’t but follow where it led.  
“Sit,” said the quiet voice that had somehow got behind her. She felt a pressure on her shoulder, which slipped down her arm until a hand circled her wrist and pulled or pushed her (she hardly knew) into a chair.  
Hannah stood behind her, her hand on her shoulder, her fingers seeking to ease the muscles which only tightened as Mary’s tension grew.  
“I have to leave. There’s no time. You don’t understand.”  
“What do you expect my brother to do?”  
“He said I should call upon him if I ever needed help.”  
“In what can he help you that I cannot,” came the voice behind her. The fingers tightening on her shoulder but still working almost hypnotically now to ease the muscles which had been resisting her touch but now seemed unable to continue to.  
“I…I don’t know,” came Mary’s answer.  
“No. What can I do for you?”  
“Can you make it… No, what am I saying. If your brother isn’t here, I need to see the magistrate.”  
“Your uncle?”  
“Is a murderer. I have evidence now.”  
The hand didn’t stop, the other moved to her face.  
“Did he do this to you?”  
“Him, his men.”  
“And you are not afraid?”  
“No. no. Not anymore. He’ll hang.”  
“You have evidence for the magistrate?”  
“My testimony.”  
“A woman’s testimony is rarely enough.”  
“It will be. They suspect him already. What I can tell them…”  
The hands ceased their movement. “Go then. It is a matter of 8 miles.”  
“I have no choice.”  
“Always.”  
Mary raised a brow in confusion but the hands were pulling at her and before she knew where she was, she was out of the door and Hannah’s hands were gone. She looked back but the door was closing and there was a long path ahead.  
On the other side of the door, Hannah leaned back.  
“He will die for this.”  
\-------------------------------------  
It wasn’t hard to convince her brother of what was necessary. Though she spoke of caution rather than revenge. And he took the path to Jamaica  
\-------------------------------------  
She had gone back to them when it was finished. Her mind was numb. Her uncle Joss… he had deserved it but her Aunt Patience… It had been a coward’s blow. She wondered if her aunt had known at the end, and if she had felt free or had been willing to die of the loss. They had been one, after all.  
She sat in the chair, exhausted, empty of most feeling. And when Hannah brought her tea and placed it before her, she drank it. And when she placed her hand upon her shoulder, she leaned into it. For what comfort was there in the world but this? She envied Hannah her different path. Envied her, wanted to be like her… wanted…  
When she woke, she was alone. The fire crackled and there were voices somewhere. And she followed them but found herself instead in a study. And she was opening drawers, she didn’t know why. Her brain was slow and her hands were curious. The drawers were empty. Except one. At the bottom lay a scrap of paper, half hidden beneath a false bottom. When she pulled it out, she recognised Hannah’s hand. The strokes of the pen were hers. She recognised the strong lines of her work. But this was unlike the others. The pieces that hung in the living room with their wild moors and their empty skies. It was a church but something wasn’t right. A wolf led his flock of sheep. A wolf in Davey’s clothing…and she knew. She saw what Hannah had already seen. The monster dressed in the covering robes of the church.  
When she turned he was there. “I see there is no need for pretence anymore.”  
She could not answer, her movements were slow and her brain slower and she knew that something…something wasn’t right. She had been drugged somehow.  
“Hannah,” she cried weakly before she fell and she couldn’t be sure whether she’d seen her or not standing in the doorway…watching or coming to save her?

\-----------------------------

She woke in a carriage. Angry whispers outside. The door of the carriage opened and Davey stood there…with Hannah behind him.  
“You knew what he was doing! How could you?”  
“Of course, I knew.” Of course, she knew. Of course. There was no lying to her, she did not fall as other women fell, she was … like him but more. She was more. She was fate itself and danced for no-one, not even for me. ‘Not even for me,’ thought Mary Yellan with a note of regret she had thought would be disgust.  
“Come and I will show you God,” said Davey. And she stepped out of the carriage into the road. His hand took hers and he pointed them towards the tors, waiting for their sacrifice.  
“Go, buy our board. I will meet you here.”  
“Where are you taking her? How will you show her this God of yours.”  
Shouting Davey turned, his composure lost for the first time since Mary had known him, “They are your Gods also! They demand a sacrifice. Those are the old ways, before this Christian God came with his mercy and his lies.”  
Hannah looked back at her brother with no expression on her face. She seemed unmoved by his rage. Mary couldn’t do anything but look at her and wish… but she needed saving no more than Hannah did. She would follow him where he wished. And she would trick him and she would run and throw him to his God. She knew the moors, and she was not hampered by a madness which drew the world in false colours. And with a smile, she turned to Davey.  
“Lead on then, to your God.”  
Davey’s face turned to joy before a look of surprise darted across it and a streak of red flashed across his neck and he fell, dragging Mary’s hand down with him. She flung free her hand and turned.  
“He was your brother.”  
“Yes. But you… you are different.”  
Hannah held out her hand. “Come with me. Come with me and I will show you how to rule Gods.”  
Mary hesitated.  
She held out her hand.


End file.
